Moshe is delayed in coming down from Har Sinai, and the people turn to Aharon and say –make us some gods that can walk before us because this guy Moshe – lo yadanu meh haya lo – “we don’t know what happened to him.”
Separating Out the Feeling of Unease from the Urge To Act
There are two parts to this statement – the movement to act and solve the issue, to make something, to do something, and the feeling underneath the movement of uncertainty and worry. The feeling is actually prior, but it is so intolerable – this sense of unease around not knowing what happened to Moshe – that there immediately arises right next to the feeling an attempt to resolve it by acting in the world. Fix it for us, they say, because we can’t stand this uncertainty..
What if they could have stayed with their unease, leaned into that discomfort, allowed the feeling but not acted on it? What if we could do that?
The basic truth of human existence is uncertainty. We are fragile creatures in a constantly changing environment. Our loved ones are at times delayed in returning; we get sick; we get old; our children undergo difficulty; we don’t know what will happen next and we don’t always know the right next step to take. We don’t know the future and we can’t control it. Lo yadanu. We don’t know, and this not knowing is uncomfortable, makes us uneasy and anxious and restless.
And so the urge arises, right alongside this unease, to escape the uncertainty by acting, by doing something in the external world – making arrangements, sending emails, going online, eating, drinking, cleaning, working, playing video games, building a wall, whatever it is – all in order to alleviate our anxiety, to give us something concrete, like the golden calf, to hold on to.
Staying with the Uncertainty
But maybe something else is called for – the ability to simply be with the discomfort of not knowing, to let go of the story around it and the desperate urge to resolve it, to get underneath the movement outward, and stay with the sensation of unease in our bodies, to tolerate that shakiness and, instead of running away from it, to enter into it.
We can, over time, learn to live in the questions. I don’t know what will happen and I’m not sure what to do next. I can sit in the discomfort of that question – how do i move forward – sit in the discomfort of not being sure, not knowing what’s next, and allow myself to live in the question until, in its own good time, an answer comes, not the answer of restless desperate rushing energy, but the slow clarity of a rising sun. There is relief here in the waiting, in the allowing, in the learning to sit in the not knowing, a sense of – yes, I don’t know, but I also don’t need to know.
Maybe this is what we mean on Purim by ad delo yada, “until one doesn’t know.”. We set ourselves the goal of moving towards a place of not knowing, of allowing ourselves not to know, entering into this other zone where it is not just ok that we don’t know, but actually celebrated.
Not Knowing is a Sacred Space
This is a sacred space, this space of not knowing. It is here that we encounter God. At the revelation at Har Sinai, Moshe is nigash el ha’arafel – he moves closer to the “fog” because sham ha’elokim, because there, in the fog, in the not knowing, is God (Exodus 20:18). In our parsha, too, when Moshe has this intense encounter with God in the cleft of the rock, the Torah says, vayered Hashem be’anan, “God came down in a cloud (Exod 34:5)” – not with clarity, but in the foggy atmosphere of a cloud. It is in the cloud of not knowing that we have the possibility of experiencing God’s presence.
The Other Kind of Knowing: Knowing God
It’s not that we entirely let go of the desire to know. There are different types of knowledge. After the golden calf, Moshe requests of God – hodi’eina na et derakhekha ve’eyda’akha (33:13)– “show me Your ways so that I can know you.” I want to know You, God, to understand you, to understand the force that drives this universe. There is a letting go of one kind of knowing and a seeking out of another kind of knowing, a letting go of the need to know the future with certainty, and an opening to the knowing of God’s essence; God’s goodness, kol tuvi, “all my goodness (33:19),” God says, will pass over you and you can sense into it. Not understand it, but sense into it from within this cloud of not knowing.
This different kind of knowing is an embodied, intuitive, imaginal sensing. It happens when we are calm and quiet, in our internal resting place, open to experiencing God’s goodness in the breeze that washes over us. By contrast, when we are anxiously attempting to “solve” the unease of an uncertain future, we become restless, paru’a, as Moshe describes the people at the Golden Calf incident, scattered, frenetic, wild, undone. The knowing Moshe experiences with God, the yediah, the “knowing” of love and intimacy, is deeply restful, like the rest of Shabbat, resting in God, slowing way down and relaxing into a different consciousness that allows us to touch this other reality, to enter a trans-like state that is the opposite of the concreteness of the golden calf.
Kesher Tefillin, the “Knot of Tefillin”: God is With Us in Our Uncertainty
We can’t know what will happen tomorrow, but the one thing we can know and count on is that God will be with us through whatever happens. God says to Moshe – I can’t show you My face – I can’t show you what lies before you, in the future (33:23). Uncertainty is how things must be for humans, as certainty would cut off the everchanging flow that sustains human life. But what I can do, says God, is to show you my backside. The rabbis interpret this to mean that God showed Moshe God’s own kesher tefillin, the knot of the tefillin (phylacteries) that lay on the back of God’s neck (Talmud Brachot 7a).
What is this kesher tefillin, this knot of tefillin? Tefillin are an ot, a sign, of our connection to God, a sign that we are bound up with, betrothed to God. And so what God showed Moshe is that God, too, is bound up with us; the knot is where the two strands meet, where we and God intersect. See this knot, God says to Moshe – that is a sign that we are always interwoven – you can mess up and make mistakes, and we will still meet in this place; I will still be here with you.
The neck is a joining place, connecting the head to the body, and in that way symbolizes this connectedness. We often have tension right in this spot, in our necks, the tension of trying to control all the uncertain things in our lives, and that makes sense. But maybe exactly in that place of tight holding, of the attempt to control uncertainty, maybe in exactly that spot, we can also feel the kesher tefillin, the sense of being bound up with God, tethered, in a net of interconnectedness not just to God, but also to everyone and everything in the universe. Whatever happens, whatever shaky terrible frightening unease you feel, you are still held in this net. Shaky and uncertain, yes, but not alone, never alone.
In the prayer Anim Zemirot, we say – kesher tefillin hera le’anav. “God showed the knot of tefillin to the humble one,” i.e. Moshe. It is precisely when we can let go of needing to know, accept with humility our human state of limited knowledge, that we are shown a deeper truth, the truth of the kesher tefillin, the truth of our perpetual interconnectedness, the truth of God’s steadfast love. When we surrender to our uncertainty, we find God there holding us in our shakiness, we find God there as the ground in our groundlessness.
What would have happened if, when the Israelites felt that unease around – we don’t know what happened to Moshe – if they could call up this kesher tefillin? What would happen if, in our own moments of uncertainty, we could call up this sign, as well, remind ourselves when we are shaky, that we are deeply bound into the fabric of the universe, into Godself?
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